unites … not all Esperantists, but all Esperantism” 104—he seemed to
be anointing Hodler as heir apparent. And with good reason: in the
pages of Esperanto, Hodler had passionately elaborated his vision of
an organization devoid of nationalism and chauvinism. For Hodler,
the interna ideo was supranationalism; he envisioned an
organization comprising individuals rather than national
associations. Hodler was apparently indifferent to Zamenhof’s
Judaism-infused cult of Homaranismo, and without ever repudiating
it, made it redundant to the interna ideo of the UEA.
Meanwhile, the movement’s day-to-day operations were run out
of the Central Office in Paris, financed and overseen by a committee
elected by national units. In 1911, amid tensions between the UEA’s
network of individual delegates and the international network of
national societies, an invidious distinction between “privileged” and
“nonprivileged” consuls paralyzed the Universal Congress, which
failed to approve yet another proposed system of governance.
Michaux was among those who lobbied hard for a “democratically
elected parliament”; rebuffed and outraged, he disbanded the 850-
member Boulogne group which, six years earlier, had hosted the first
international congress. By 1912, it had become impossible for
Zamenhof both to propound the interna ideo, and to preside, even
ceremonially, over what he called the interna milito (internal war),
so he announced that he would resign his honorary post at the
upcoming Universal Congress in Kraków.
Not by coincidence did he step down in Poland. After a rash of
anti-Esperanto articles in the Polish press, he acknowledged that, as
a Jew, he himself had cast a shadow over the movement. He told the
Congress Committee in Kraków that, outside of Poland, Esperanto
had its critics; but “among us [in Poland],” criticism was “based only
on a more or less disguised hatred of me personally. It’s a fact that I
did ill to no one but I am a Jew born in Lithuania.” 105 Asking the
committee to refer to him not as a Pole, but as a “son of Poland,” he
clarified his identity as follows: “According to my religio-politcal
convictions, I am neither a Pole nor a Russian, nor a Jew, but I’m a
partisan of ‘Homaranismo’
(don’t
confuse
this
with
‘cosmopolitanism’); as far as my origins go, I count myself among
the Jewish people.” To this day, the term “Jewish-origin”
(judadivena) is preferred to “Jewish” by many Esperantists, both
Jewish and non-Jewish.
There were repercussions at Kraków about Zamenhof’s Judaism,
but from an unexpected quarter. When a Jew named Kvitner
requested to salute the congress in the name of the Jewish people,
the congress secretary, a lawyer named Leon Rosenstock, turned him
down. Kvitner appealed to Zamenhof for a hearing, and it was
rumored that Zamenhof responded, “Don’t touch the Jewish problem
during the Universal Congress, because the movement will suffer.”
(Zamenhof did not deny the episode, but later said he had urged
Kvitner not to use the term “Jewish people,” but rather “Yiddish
speakers” or “those Jews who consider themselves a separate
people.”) Diatribes ensued from two leading Yiddish papers in New
York, Tageblatt and Die Wahrheit. To the latter, Zamenhof retorted:
Every Esperantist in the world knows very well that I am a
Jew.… The Esperantists know that I translated works from
the Yiddish language; they know that already [for] more
than three years I devoted all my free time to translating
the Bible from the Hebrew original; they know that I
always live in the strictly Jewish part of Warsaw (in which
many Jews are ashamed to live), and I continue to publish
my works at a Jewish Press, etc. Is this how a person acts
who is ashamed about his origins and strives to hide his
Jewishness? 106
But among all these claims that he was unashamed of his Judaism,
the creator of the universal language did not disclose that he had
been among Warsaw’s leading Zionists in the 1880s.
The issue of Zamenhof’s Jewish identity raised at Kraków did not
go away. Two years later, he was asked by William Heller, president
of the Litomierc Esperanto group, to join a new World Jewish
Esperanto Association (TEHA). Zamenhof’s response was to wish the
organization well, suggest that they publish a bilingual (Yiddish-
Esperanto) journal, and promise to attend a meeting. But he refused
to join; he would countenance neither nationalism “from above,” in
Michael Walzer’s phrase, nor from below, as he wrote to Heller:
Every nationalism presents for humanity only the greatest
unhappiness.… It is true that nationalism of a repressed
people—as a natural defensive reaction—is much more
forgivable, than nationalism of oppressing people; but if
nationalism of the strong is ignoble, nationalism of the
weak is imprudent; both … present an erring cycle of
unhappiness, from which humanity never escapes. 107
* * *
The marketplace of ideas put a negligible value on Homaranismo,
just as it had on Hilelismo—and, in the early days, on Esperanto. But
Zamenhof responded to indifference and rejection not by discarding
his tattered cause, but by taking it to new audiences, mended and
patched. In 1913, he published, for the first time under his own
name, a revision of Homaranismo, referring to the sect as a “neutral-
human religion.” Despite the name, the emphasis on universalist
“religion” decisively gave way to that of a “neutral-human”
community. He was addressing not only ethical monotheists among
the Esperantists, but also atheists. He was also targeting, for the first
time, citizens of states with a continuous history of interethnic
conflict. In such polities, he argued, a neutral language, supported
and sustained by the state, could promote the participation of
linguistic minorities, ensuring inclusive and more equitable
representation and a fairer distribution of goods. Moreover,
equipped with a neutral-human language, citizens of various states
could use their common tongue to discuss issues of common interest.
He framed the issue not in terms of “language rights,” as we would
now say, but in terms of the ethical obligations of states toward
their citizens.
For the first time, Zamenhof was glimpsing a role for Esperanto
in politics: Esperanto, equally accessible to all and easy to learn,
would be a method by which citizens of a multicultural state could
equitably and jointly determine their future, deliberate on policy,
adjudicate disputes, and educate its citizens of the future. Esperanto
itself might be politically neutral, but Zamenhof was convinced that
its value to political life in a state such as Belgium or Switzerland—
or, someday, to an international federation of states—was
potentially vast. As usual, Zamenhof lacked the influence,
infrastructure, and funding to be an effective advocate for the use of
Esperanto in such polities, but these were precisely the arguments
that would be revived after Zamenhof’s death by those seeking to